Leading for Results – the Easy Way
ByI had a delightful discussion recently with the Director of a substantial medical center. She and her team had been “beaten up” by corporate when they received an admittedly abysmal 18% effectiveness rating in one of the 150 areas for which they are measured. Not surprisingly, it created a great deal of frustration on the team, and opened up quite a change management opportunity for the Director.
Being a staunch believer in the essence of Enlightened Leadership and Leadership Made Simple, she knew the solution to the problem lied within the creativity of the people involved. She also knew that creativity would never surface if they stayed in their frustrated state.
To get past that frustration, she encouraged them to shift their focus to what was working – not only in that specific area, but in other areas that might trigger insights for how to do this one differently.
Using that Forward Focus(TM) approach, the team came up with several ideas they could immediately implement to improve the situation. As they got positive results from those early actions, they were energized to find more creative ideas – which, of course, they had no problem generating!
They periodically got back together to build on their successes to continually improve that particular metric. It was an easy process – celebrating and analyzing successes and taking the resulting creative energy to come up with more improvement ideas.
By the time the August numbers came out, they had improved the metric from 18% to 90% effectiveness in just 4 months. What an amazing performance improvement. This is what leading for results – the easy way – looks like!
Our acknowledgment and congratulations to the team!
In what ways have you experienced leading for results the easy way? We would love to hear – your solutions and your challenges.
2 Comments
October 14th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
As editor-in-chief of a national business magazine, I noticed that we were having increasing problems dealing with the volume of e-mail. But we hadn’t analyzed the problem. I did a little research to find out what type of e-mails were causing us the most volume problems. It was not junk mail. It was duplicate e-mails being sent to the whole staff.
Rather than try to figure out a solution, I told the staff we were going to have a meeting to work on the problem. It took us only 40 minutes to further analyze the issue, figure out a way to create a central e-mail address for the types of releases that were being duplicated, incorporate our new system announcement into each outgoing e-mail, etc. The point is, I had heard or been taught in a management class to give the problems to the staff when possible. They enjoyed the brainstorming session, I had my problem solved and we all then felt confident each time a problem came up that we could all solve.
The age of managers knowing everything is over. Certain staff members have specialized knowledge. I get much more out of recognizing that knowledge and tapping it than pretending that I can solve the problem on my own.
The bonus was that the staff, I think, appreciated the fact that I called them in to “consult” on this issue: that way their particular e-mail issues also were considered in forming the solution.
This approach to problem solving worked better (and quicker) than I ever could have imagined.
October 14th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Being a corportae Team-bsed culture coach and trainer, I conclude the the director of the subject medical center utilized an important component of her team building: “Empowerment.” When she empowred her team to come up with other alternatives, she included her team in an important element of teaming and decision making and that is inclusion approach. This has worked in many critical situations in variuos organizations regardless, private or government, product or service, for or non-profit.
Regards,
Dr. Kami Moghaddam